


Pavane for a Dead Prince

by shellfishDimes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Afterlife, Angst, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Dream Bubble, F/M, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Gore, M/M, Multi, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Quadrant Confusion, Sadstuck, Sloppy Makeouts, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-22
Updated: 2012-02-22
Packaged: 2017-10-31 14:21:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/344979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shellfishDimes/pseuds/shellfishDimes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You were six solar sweeps old when you died. You woke up in a half-remembered not-place, on the beach at moon rise. The sea is a dusky indigo and the clouds are churning overhead, crackling with lightning and the threat of oncoming rain which is never realised. The dream bubble is almost holding its breath for something that should happen, but hasn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pavane for a Dead Prince

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [messageredacted](http://archiveofourown.org/users/messageredacted) for the beta, handholding, egging on and motivation. Without her help, this would be a mess.

If this were a place where dreams were possible, yours would be bad. If this were a place where nightmares existed, you would have them whenever you went to sleep. There is no sleep here – and still, you close your eyes, and you see their faces, floating on the backs of your eyelids with knotted brows and lips pulled back over fangs to form a snarl, or sealed shut and down-turned, sour. It leaves a chilling taste in your mouth, reminding you of when you used to hit a patch of cold current while swimming. The icy water would filter through your gills with an unpleasant tickling sensation, like a sheet of cold metal sliding against the backs of your knees. And just like it would pass when you swam away, the feeling goes when you open your eyes. The faces dissolve like leftover pools of sea water in the unforgiving Alternian sunshine, leaving behind them nothing but salty trails, an afterthought reminiscent of the fact that everything has its place, and everything happens for a reason.

When you touch your face, your cheeks are wet, and when you look at your fingers they come off covered in purple blood: your own blood.

It is impossible to record the passage of time in this place, if it can indeed be called a place. The ground you are currently sitting on is substantial enough, but if you let your eyes wander to either of your sides for too long, or should you be so inclined to get up and walk behind you, the edges would blur and eventually disappear. 

Sitting down seems less pointless and much less painful than trying to explore your surroundings. When you go under your shirt to touch the skin of your stomach, you feel the ragged, ripped out flesh, and the cut of the wound running from one of your hips to the next and all around to your back. You were sawed in half. No one can survive that. A leisurely walk into uncertainty may not be the best idea right now. 

You are not lying in two halves, obviously; that would be ludicrous. But when you hunch over, or when you try and sit up it there is a squelching noise that you feel more than hear, as if the only thing that's holding you together is your own resolve to stay in one piece, or perhaps some sort of different arrangement of physics that exists in this place. You are not even ready to begin considering to call it _magic_ , because your use of a white science wand has proven for a fact that magic is as fake as something imaginary could possibly be.

Your fingers bury into the dry sand next to you with ease, until they hit the moister layer and scrape against its top. The grains go under your claws as you ball your hand into a fist, the excess sand seeping out from between your closing fingers. When you were younger, the movement of the sand and its granular texture against your skin used to calm you down. It worked nearly as well as the tuneless murmuring of a troll girl who thought her only audience were the cuttlefish she was chasing. You were never acknowledged, that was the thing – _you_ , a highblood, a sea dweller, someone whose very presence should, to all intents and purposes, fill anyone with instant awe and fear. 

You were so often on the sidelines and overlooked, ignored because there was something more pressing, or more pleasing to deal with, rather than a gangly, long-nosed FLARPer with bad eyesight. It is no quirky linguistic coincidence that the word 'friend' is synonymous with the word 'enemy' in Alternian. Real friends or enemies are equally difficult to acquire; you are the example that proves this rule. They wrote you off like the insignificant piece of shit disappointment to your ancestor that you are.

 

** > Who's this disappointment? Enter name.**

 

Your name is Eridan Ampora and you have been fighting tears for a while. You were six solar sweeps old when you died. You woke up in a half-remembered not-place, on the beach at moon rise. 

The sea is a dusky indigo and the clouds are churning overhead, crackling with lightning and the threat of oncoming rain which is never realised. The dream bubble is almost holding its breath for something that should happen, but hasn't. Away from the shore you can see the outlines of your hive, and it doesn't make you ache for its familiarity. There is nothing to be hivesick for; this entire reality is made out of patched-up pieces of memory of a place you cannot go back to. 

You take your fist out from where it's buried in the sand and unclench it, palm upwards. The sand slides off, bits of it sticking to the heel of your palm and the tips of your fingers, where the specks of your blood have nearly dried. You are not a wiggler any more, and the feeling of sand running through your hands does nothing to improve your presence of mind. There is nowhere to abscond from your thoughts.

There is no moirail who would sing you to peace, either. Because you killed her. You shot her in the chest and you can imagine, without even trying particularly hard, that you heard the sound of her ribs cracking and her ribcage collapsing under the power of your wand, as her precious tyrian purple blood gushed out of the hole you'd made. 

As long as she was alive, there was hope in you that you could restore your moirallegiance, because all signs pointed to the fact that Feferi and you were made for each other. You were a firm believer in troll serendipity.

Troll serendipity, however, did not believe in you, so you chose to end it before you could be mocked any further.

You close your eyes, breathing in the salty smell of the ocean which isn't really there, and the tangy copper smell of your own blood, and imagine what it would be like to have plunged your hand in her thoracic cavity as she lay dead on the hornpile, and to close your claws around her blood pusher. To yank it out of her collapsing and expanding bladder based aquatic vascular system, because there's only one troll that her blood pusher deserves to belong to, and that troll is you.

 

** > Cease this bullshit. Move to another dream bubble and try to find your dead friends. **

 

There is nobody who will appreciate your presence. Because you killed their friends, and you destroyed the matriorb, wiping out with it any chance the trolls had of recovering from the disaster that the game inflicted on your entire race. Sometimes, it makes you smug that you alone, with your two hands and your legendary weapon, managed to go through with something as perfectly destructive, beautifully horrifying like that, and your shoulders shake and you laugh, and you laugh until your severed stomach aches and you have to stop, and you have to clutch at your mid-section to stem the blood which turns from a slow ooze into a violent flow. 

Yes, sometimes it makes you giddy with power – but most of the time, like now, you realise how alone you actually are, and you keep on looking out to the sea. Before you entered the session, you would often sit on the beach like this, resting or just sitting in an impressive position should anyone happen to pass by and see you. You'd got used to seeing a shift in the waves that was instantly recognisable. The heiress would approach you with an excited smile on her face, and she would sit by you, her head resting on your shoulder and her horns gently poking into your cheek. Your arm would always be behind her, ready to pull her into a hug should she scoot any closer, but you never made the first move in case she pulled away before your hand was even on her shoulder. 

Nobody will come here, and at the end of the night, there is just you and the things you failed to do, and the blood on your hands. At least it's just your own blood; there is no tyrian purple, jade or ochre on you to serve as further reminder of what happened. Being marked with their deaths in such an obvious way, being able to smell and taste their blood whether you wanted to or not would overwhelm your senses too much, until your think pan started buzzing with the quadrants you failed to fill, and their faces, always accusatory, never understanding.

What will you do?

 

** > Eridan: Reminisce.**

 

You collapse on the ground. You close your eyes on the grey sky and lie still as your shirt sticks to your bloody, ruined stomach, and sand sticks to your back and your hair. Your scarf is mottled with caked blood, and you twist your fingers in the fabric. You used to come to her hive and she would sneak up behind you, stealing your scarf and swimming away with it, giggling. When you had caught up with her – she was always a much faster swimmer than you were, and when she got tired of the game she would deliberately slow down and let you catch her – she would wrap your scarf around your neck herself, flicking your nose afterwards. It seemed to always sit better around your neck when she tied it.

A shadow falls over your prone form. This would be a good time to reach for your science wand – except that you do not have it and, as a result, you are as ineffectual and as defenceless as you can possibly be. Your eyes snap open and you prepare to abscond at a moment's notice. It does not cross your mind that whoever has approached you might be benevolent: at this stage, you are no longer deluding yourself that anyone would be sympathetic towards you.

The light is hitting their back, so you cannot see the face of the person standing above you, but you don't need to: you recognise them by the two sets of horns, and by the fact that you are immediately, brutally kicked in the ribs. Resisting the urge to curl up and clutch your sides to shield yourself from the pain, you lash out and grab at his ankle, just above the white shoe, the tip of which is now smudged with the blood from your stomach. 

You grab his ankle and you _pull_ just as he raises it to kick you again. He loses his footing and there is a moment when he flails his arms uselessly in the air trying to regain his balance. You make a mental note to laugh in his face about it later. He comes crashing to the ground and you're on him, pinning his chest down with your knees and punching him wherever you can reach. He paws at your front, claws digging into your shirt until his hands find your scarf. He pulls on both its ends, squeezing the fabric around your throat, choking you.

"You piece of shit," he growls as you try to push him off, raking your claws down his bare arms. He yanks at your scarf and you croak as you're pulled down next to his face. Your nose nearly hits the sand and your cheek brushes against his side. You smell the blood covering his face, mustard, viscous and disgusting.

He grabs at the hemline of your shirt and pulls it up, and for a second confusion blossoms in your think pan – and then he jabs four of his fingers into your wound, down to the knuckle, and it's pain like you've never felt before. 

When Kanaya sawed you in half, it was shock more than pain. You were dead before you hit the ground. This time, it's excruciating. He digs his fingers in and _twists_ and you scream out, white spots exploding all over your vision. You feel like you can't breathe and like you want to throw up at the same time but there's just not enough strength in you – all of you is concentrated on that spot in your stomach as his fingers are digging into you. You can hear sobbing, and it's only when you collapse on top of him, not being able to hold yourself up any longer, that you realise the sobbing isn't coming from you.

Sollux pulls his fingers out of your stomach, shoving you off. His entire body is wracked with sobs as you try and get your breath back and block out the pain. This is a side of Sollux Captor you've never seen before, and the novelty of this display makes you stare dumbly at him, momentarily forgetting the pain.

 

** > Be Sollux Captor. Become the hero: avenge your friends. **

 

You can't do that. It doesn't make any sense: you're both dead, and so are all of your friends. You can cause Eridan physical pain, which you have tried to do with enthusiasm and aplomb. 

It kind of felt good for the first couple of hits, until you realised how pointless it was to be going at each other like a pair of nut creatures over a single acorn. Besides, you have very limited strife capabilities when you're not using your psionics. You are just a waste of space and a failure in every imaginable way: you couldn't even save your friends from certain doom, you useless piece of shit. Not that you weren't aware that you were going to fail, of course, but that doesn't take away from you being a useless piece of shit.

Let's face it, you're blubbing. You're dead, you're in Eridan's dream bubble, and you're blubbing like a wiggler because you have no idea what else to do. You tried to pilot the meteor into the Green Sun because your friends had asked you to. You know some of your history, and you know that your ancestor, the Ψiioniic, piloted Her Imperious Condescension's flagship for many sweeps, so you rode on the confidence of that, thinking you could be as good as the most powerful telekinetic mage in history.

You are not only a useless piece of shit, you are also a vain, arrogant, useless piece of shit who, in his arrogance, overestimated his abilities and brought on the death of his friends. You tried to save them, and you killed them. In your eyes, you're just as bad as Eridan. And that's why you can't stop crying.

 

** > Be the other dead troll.**

 

You press your palms into your stomach, counting on the pressure to ease the pain. It doesn't stop, but it becomes somewhat manageable. You are lying on your side, almost curled up, and you can feel the sand unpleasantly rubbing on the sensitive skin of your fins as you try your best not to writhe about in agony. Sollux doesn't look like he's in any kind of better shape. He sits up, running his hands through his hair and swallowing down his sobs. Blood has run out of his ears and down his neck, but it has mostly dried now. When he turns to look at you – eyebrows twisted in an expression of pure, raw platonic hatred – you see that his eye sockets glow dull white, even though there do not appear to be any eyes behind the light.

His face is streaked with tears, but you also see blood, and it's not just thin lines: it's like his eyes were spurting blood for a long time, and you notice trails of blood leading from the corners of his mouth and down his chin. He blinks once, twice, staring at you sightlessly, and as he does, fresh droplets of blood trickle out of his eyes and he looks like he's crying, like a statue from a story. You read somewhere that the Grand Highblood made the statues in his palace weep blood because he found it amusing, and you wonder about the authenticity of this. 

Sollux wipes his face with the back of his hand, and you notice that his fingers are stained with your purple blood. Your bile sac churns at this, as if unsure whether to expel its contents because your royal blood is on his unworthy fingers, or shudder with the metaphorical flutterbeasts flapping their tiny wings inside it at the sight of the eyes that used to be red and blue, but that you made blind.

"What?" he spits. "I can smell you staring, nookstain. Don't make me kick you again."

"Are they really all dead?" you ask. The sentence rolls off your tongue and leaves an aftertaste that you can't exactly pinpoint. You have been sat on this beach long enough to taste the brittle grains of sand squeaking between your teeth, a taste not unlike regret, if regret had a taste. But there is also something like the remnants of a never-eaten, rubbery cockle on your tongue, like the ones you used to share with Feferi when you were wigglers. She'd make you stack the empty shells up into hives, castles and cities, like the ones, she said, that she would reign over when she was empress. It tastes _good_ , this feeling that you are all dead and gone, and that there isn't going to be a new empress or an empire anymore, that everyone has paid for the mistake of not giving you the recognition or the trust you deserve.

"Yes, they're all dead," says Sollux, his eyes narrowing. "I tried to pilot the meteor into the Green Sun, Jack caught on, showed up, killed everyone _you_ didn't manage to finish off. We could have survived longer if there were more of us there to fight. Asshole," he hisses. You want to jab your fingers into his eye sockets until your hands are stained with his despicable yellow blood; you want to make up for both the times that you duelled him in life and didn't get to be close enough to deal real, physical damage. Of course, ranged attacks still hold their charm and remain the first choice of strife in your opinion, but it's a different deal with Sollux Captor. 

He was trying to become red with your moirail. He was obstructing the natural course of things and it was because of _him_ that this ended the way it did.

In death, it's personal. You want your fingers in his eyes and your knee in his stomach and your foot on his head, pushing his face into the sand as you watch his pathetic, weak land dweller form wriggle and struggle for breath, as you watch the last sliver of life leave his body – and then you remember.

You're both already dead. But at least these kinds of thoughts are making you feel better about yourself. It always feels good to shoulder the guilt onto someone else. Especially if that someone else is a piss-blood hacker who turned your moirail against you. 

You cannot _believe_ she preferred him. She was _yours_ , and you were so red for her once that it made your blood pusher clench because you couldn't, you wouldn't tell her until it was the only remaining choice, because she was your future empress and you were just a soldier. A soldier with a powerful weapon, a sea dweller, a highblood: but when it came to it, a soldier was all you were. She was going to discard you when she reached adulthood and the throne, unless you filled a quadrant with her.

The oceans would roil in terror with the name _Eridan Ampora_ , and you would stand by Feferi's side as her matesprit, the terror of Alternia, the blight of the lowbloods. Your deeds would eclipse those of your ancestor, reducing him to a footnote in history, and _you_ would be the Orphaner – your Crosshairs would strike fear into wigglers, and the seas would swell with the blood of their dead lusii. You were going to accomplish so much, and then it all crashed around your fins, because she wouldn't have you.

You don't realise you're still staring at Sollux until he hisses sharply and pushes himself up from the sand. He starts walking inland, but it's clear that he hasn't been accustomed to his blindness – he trips over his feet and stumbles forward, and as he does, the thing around his neck slips from under his shirt and flashes in the moonlight.

You scramble up and lunge at him, fangs bared and vision clouded with jealousy, blood pumping with loneliness.

 

** > GRIEF! **

 

The wind is knocked out of you as Eridan slams into you, arms grabbing around your mid-section. His horns nearly gore you – you only have dumb luck to thank that they miss, catching instead on your shirt and ripping it loudly as you both crash to the ground. Eridan is all elbows as he jabs and punches at every bit of you. It's so frustrating that you can't see – you can smell his blood, and you think you can almost smell its colour, but the fact that you are both covered in it significantly takes away from your ability to find your bearings.

You claw at what you're hoping is his chest, trying to get at his face, to knock his glasses off because you suppose that his eyesight is nearly as poor as yours was without them. He swats your hands away and slams them onto the ground. Even though you're lying in sand, the pain is as dull and thick as hitting a wall running. Eridan places the heel of his hand under your chin and pushes, making your head arch back painfully. 

His fingers skate over your sniffnode and grip Feferi's goggles, and it seems like he's going to rip them off your neck, but he hesitates. You saw him go almost feral; you know he killed her, because you came to after he knocked you out to find her lying among Gamzee's shitty horns, sodden with blood, with a hole blasted through her that reeked of ozone. But now, he's hesitant to snap a simple piece of plastic.

"Take them off," says Eridan, and his voice is haughty and demanding. He's beginning to sound like the sea dweller you know and dislike again.

You smirk. "No."

The one word is enough to send him into a shuddering rage, and you have to admit you're apprehensive about what he might do – your movement is limited and your vision and psionics nonexistent. You are not going to provoke him again – you remember all too well how that ended the last time you tried it – and besides, he's clearly got the upper hand here. You lie taut as a bowstring, waiting.

All that happens, however, is that his claws dig sharply into your arm, sharp enough to break the skin. He doesn't attempt to hurt you further than that. Self-control isn't something you'd expect from a sea dweller, and yet here it is. 

"You don't deserve to fucking have them," hisses Eridan. "She doesn't want you, you brinesucking, blind gutter-blood! Why do you think you're here, Sol? You think you floundered on this by fuckin' chance?"

You feel a rush of air as he leans into your face, and you are overwhelmed with smells: the sea-salt, slightly fishy smell of sea dweller, the coppery-bitter smell of his purple blood, and the stale smell of his breath, like kelp drying in the sun. "Fef helped make the dream bubbles," he says, "and if she wanted to see you, she'd look for you. Why do you think you're like this?" Very slowly, he drags his claws down the side of your face, and you let out a painful groan. "You're not getting forgiveness."

It makes sense. She told you about dream bubbles. She told you how everything was nice and beautiful in them, and there was no pain. Yet, when you got here your head was throbbing, your ears and eyes were bleeding, and there was Eridan.

The realisation hits you that he's right: you deserve this.

You were the one to blame in the first place: back on the meteor, you were dumb enough to rise to Eridan's taunts and provoke him. If you had kept your stupid maw shut, all of this could have been avoided. Feferi wouldn't be dead. You could have stood some sort of chance against Jack. But no, you had to step in between finface and Feferi because you thought that you could take him. By that point, all previous resolve of staying out of duels with Eridan had left you, and you didn't care if duelling with him would further encourage his delusions of a kismesisstude between the two of you. You wanted him to leave Feferi and you alone for good, and because of your effrontery, because you weren't strong enough and you dared to begin developing flushed feelings for the abdicated empress to be, he killed her. 

You are a horrible person. Worse, _Eridan Ampora_ just told you you're a horrible person – _and you agree with him_. You deserve everything that's happened or will happen to you, because you practically delivered everyone to Death's door, wrapped with a bow on top and complete with a simpering note about how you hope Death will appreciate your gift.

 

** > Eridan: FINISH HIM! **

 

Yes, this is beautiful. Were you a freak like Pyrope, you would say that you could almost taste his surrender on your tongue. Even if you had planned it – which you hadn't, since you were too busy pitying yourself – you couldn't have done it any better. Sollux looks like all his ships have sunk. If it was possible for someone to be slouching in defeat while lying down, Sollux Captor would be doing it at this very instant. If there was a competition for being the most defeated-looking loser, he would win all the awards simply by sidling into the room.

"You're wrong, shitsponge," he growls, but it's half-hearted. He doesn't sound like he believes himself at all and it makes your mouth spread into a predatory grin.

You could hurt him so badly when he's lying prone like this. Your think pan buzzes with the possibilities. Killing came so easily when you had Ahab's Crosshairs and your science wand. The light thrummed out of your magnificent weapons which wrought destruction on all they touched. To see your victims crumple, lifeless, in front of you, or fall into the ocean with a satisfying splash as your nostrils filled with the smell of ozone and their blood; it made you feel like royalty.

"Don't fuckin' use that tone on me," you snap, squeezing his throat, pressing your fingers into the side of his neck to ignore the fact that they are shaking. It's a different kettle of fish when you only have your hands to rely on and no weapons to hide behind.

You never thought you would be put in a situation where you would be without a strife specibus and had to aggrieve and not abscond. You are too close to him to feel comfortable with hurting him; as gabby as you were about culling all land dwellers, you always imagined yourself commanding an imperial army, or pushing the right buttons on a doomsday device. Killing is one thing: getting your hands dirty, quite another. 

He's not the only one trapped: you were here before him, and whatever you do to him won't wash her blood off your hands or make her forgive you. By the way he smirked at you when he refused to hand over Feferi's goggles, you know that blind, piss-blood Sollux Captor sees that, and you hate him for it.

You could pay him back for _everything_ , you could – and then something so terrifying flashes in your mind that you snap your hands away from his face and neck as if electrocuted. Their faces are in your mind once more. Kanaya's snarling mouth as she debunked your science wand and the way you shook when you saw her do it because _why didn't she stay dead_ ; Feferi's culling fork raised at you even though all you ever wanted to see her smile at you. You've broken skin when you were trying to fight Sollux, and now his mustard-coloured blood is underneath your claws, making the back of your throat burn with rising bile; making you think of tyrian purple blood and how you barely managed to wrench your eyes away from the way she gave a few final twitches before collapsing, dead.

Dazed and shaking, you scramble off him, stumbling backwards and kicking to get as far away as possible. 

With the sudden, frantic movements, the flesh of your mid-section rips anew. You can feel it protesting as you curl in on yourself and dig your fingers into the wound under your shirt, your fingers coating in your fresh, warm blood and digging into your insides. Because you deserve this, you deserve this. 

Tears drip from your eyes onto your glasses. They slide down the frame and plop onto the sand as your mind reels with images of writhing, tentacle creatures rising from the sea and reaching out to grab you, to snap you like a twig, and you can hear her voice scream:

 

YOU WILL NOT )(URT )(IM, --ERIDAN!!!

 

The sound is not in your auricular sponge clots and your think pan as much as it is in your entire body, reverberating through your collapsing and expanding bladder based aquatic vascular system and your bones. It feels like being set on fire from the inside, as every molecule heats up and spins and burns, like a cyclone inside of you with your blood pusher as the eye of the storm. The heat expands to your toes and your fingertips, the tips of your gills and the ends of your horns, and it burns with an intensity you thought couldn't be felt without dying.

 

** > Sollux: Watch. **

 

Very funny. 

You feel Eridan scramble off you as if stung, and you hear him sobbing not very far from where you are, emitting noises like a bleatbeast being culled, but you are in the dark – literally, you think with what's almost a smirk – as to what brought this on. There is nothing you can smell or hear around you that could warrant this kind of reaction. All that you've noticed is that the sound of rolling thunder appears to be louder and closer than before, and yet this does not explain the sudden hysterics from the sea dweller. You can smell his tears and his blood and it makes you so sick to your bile sac that you don't notice that he's talking at first.

"... doing the right thing," says Eridan, swallowing thickly after nearly every sentence, punctuating the pauses between words with shallow, tear-stained breaths. "But I ruined everything by trying to stick my nose in where it didn't belong. I wanted to be noticed, and none of you would notice me!" He shouts this out, and sniffs several times. You can't see it, but you can imagine him wiping the tears from his face with the sleeve of his shirt.

It's so completely pathetic, it's almost pitiful. The tender skin around the base of your four horns itches, like a thousand tiny gnawbeasts are sharpening their fangs on it. You don't understand what it means to be that lonely, because you never were. You were never the sad mutant, high in your communal hive stem; you were a psionic and a hacker, and sometimes, when you didn't think you absolutely sucked, you could be pretty good at it. The thought that you needed to fill quadrants in order to feel validated was always an alien, incomprehensible one. There was never any point: you were born to be a slave, and you had always known you were not going to live long enough for quadrants to matter. You had your bees and you had Karkat, Aradia, and, for a short time, Feferi. 

The one thing that can with absolute certainty be said about death is that it puts things into perspective.

"I fucked everything up," Eridan says. "I wanted to fix things, but I was just inexcusably stupid, and now there's nothin' left to be fixed." His accent becomes more pronounced when he's upset, you realise, the words sounding more wavy as he swallows back a sob, and you find yourself amazed that he, someone who would usually well up at the slightest provocation, seems to have willed himself into stopping his crying. "I deserve this. I can't expect you to forgive me somethin' so fuckin' inexpiable." 

The realisation that the asshole is finally admitting to his mistakes makes your blood pusher thump harder: he's finally understood just what kind of colossal douchebag he was being. If you were any less cool and composed about this sudden development, you would ball your hand into a fist and punch the air in triumph, because he's getting it. And if there's anyone who deserves punishment perhaps even more than you do, it's him. 

You caused the death of all of your friends, and that's why you deserve to spend an eternity without them. Eridan, you realise, was ignored and shunned his whole life, and when he finally decided to do something about it, to become important by whatever means it took, it blew up in his face. Feferi was the only one who gave a shit about him and he killed her when she stopped, not knowing any other way to deal with losing one of the only friends he'd ever made. And now his punishment was to continue being lonely, because he was too much of a wiggler to understand that friendship and quadrants meant mutual respect and understanding instead of simply wanting everyone else involved catering to your wants. 

Your chitinous windhole clenches like someone has wrapped a sandpaper ribbon around it, pulled it tight, and twisted it around several times for good measure. 

Holy shit.

You pity this kid. You pity him in a completely non-platonic way, in all his insanity of being a homicidal, delusional loser. You pity him the way you sometimes used to pity Karkat and his eloquent shitstorms of curse words and elaborate descriptions of how much he hated himself, and how big of a festering heap of hoofbeast excrement he thought you could be. 

This is really bad. 

This is also really, really unexpected. 

 

** > Eridan: Regain composure. **

 

You rub the tears from your eyes, wanting to erase every trace of them ever being there in the first place, pushing your glasses up to your forehead as you do so. When they fall back on your nose and you try and look through them, your vision is blurred. With disgust, you realise the glasses are speckled with pale purple tears, and you whisk them off your face to wipe them on a scrap of scarf that isn't caked with blood or sand. 

Sollux is a black and yellow blur on a patch of grey until you replace your glasses. He's looking at you – well, no, it would be more accurate to say that his face is pointed at you – with an expression of puzzlement, his upper lip curled to form something between a snarl and a sneer, eyebrows raised as high as they can go. It would look comical were it not for the fact that his eye sockets gape empty. It makes you both want to turn away and keep looking at the same time. Like when you couldn't look away from her jerking, bleeding body.

Somehow, he feels you watching, and his features sink into a frown. One of his hands goes up and you tense, awaiting an attack, but all he does is finger the pair of plastic goggles around his neck. 

She always looked like a different person when she took them off. When you were four sweeps old, she liked to play a stupid game where she'd swap her goggles for your glasses and then let you chase her in the surf, knowing full well that you couldn't see farther than your nose. Wearing your glasses, neither could she, and you would stumble blindly after each other, peals of her laughter and your awkward chuckling suppressed by the sound of the waves breaking on the shore.

"Do you think she can hear us?" Sollux asks. His tone is genuinely curious, if slightly concerned, while you expected it to be mocking: after all, you _had_ been talking to the empty air, answering a voice in your head. You look out to the sea, but there is nothing apart from the faraway horizon and the empty expanse of the ocean. Nothing breaks the surface, because nothing is here with you apart from the yellow-blood.

You want to say _I hope she can_ , but you would rather not have anything more to do with that, either as an aspect or as a feeling. Previously, you thought the game was wrong in assigning you the title of Prince of Hope, because you didn't understand how it applied to you. Your role, you were convinced, was to provide and secure hope; but then you realised, in a flapping of a hundred thousand angel wings and with the blasts of one legendary weapon, that everything you had believed was wrong. A Prince conquered. And so you conquered hope until there was none left for anyone else.

"No," you say truthfully, and Sollux's face falls. 

"Why did you say all that stuff, then?" 

"Because–" you start, and your mouth gapes open. Admitting to hearing voices that weren't there and made your think pan hurt is not a sign of sanity. Although sanity is perhaps a luxury you are not sure you can afford any longer, you would rather get sawed in half again than have Sollux see that. "Why are you even here?" you snap. "This is _my_ dream bubble, and I don't want your lowblood stench sullying my air." You fall back onto the soft, welcoming cushion of self-pity wrapped in lies and bigotry. It doesn't feel as comfortable as it used to. Of course you crave an audience, having grown tired of feeling self-pity when you're on your own, but the pissblood is not exactly an ideal companion. 

Judging by the look he gives you – you wonder how someone can throw such a hateful look while not having any eyes to do it with – the feeling is quite mutual. "Dream bubbles work on the principle of common points in memory, right?" he says, adopting the same annoying soapbox tone that Karkat did when he talked about Troll Rachel McAdams and Troll Lindsey Lohan flipping quadrants in that romantic comedy he made you watch. "AA explained it to us." 

You find yourself annoyed that he seems to know more about this than you do. It was _your_ best friend who convinced the horrorterrors to glub out the dream bubbles. He has no right to know more than you do. "So," Sollux continues, and you wish he still had that stupid lisp so you could hate him more, "it must have been a joint memory that drew us here together, and this place is probably a shared realm or a mixture of both of our memories of…" He hesitates, and scratches his head before he settles lamely on "Something."

"I haven't got time for your wish-upon-a-star Pupa Pan codshit," you sneer. "I'm not wasting eternity looking at your smug mutant face while you try to schoolfeed me. I'm way too old for that." His smirk looks like he begs to differ, but you continue talking before he has the chance to tell you as much. "Anyway, get your fuckin' facts straight before you go all academic on me: I was here long before you, so it's your own fucking mistake you ended up with me."

"But this is your memory, nookslammer," he says. "So think of something else and we can get the carp out of here."

"You're not allowed to use fish puns," you snap.

He laughs. "I can do whatever the _shell_ I want. What are you going to do about it?"

"I'd pull out your tongue and then feed it back to you if I wasn't so put off by your disgusting mustard blood getting all over my hands."

He chuckles again and sticks out his tongue at you. Your bile sac knots with revulsion when you see that the tip is split right down the middle, like a fangbeast's. 

"See, I already made you think of something else," he says, pulling his tongue back in, which makes you thankful for a number of reasons. "Now work on that, and hurry up. Every second I spend here with you is one too many." 

"I'm telling you," you say, exasperated by his condescending tone, "I don't know what this memory is supposed to be _of_. I was just lying here, minding my own business, thinking of what a leviathan failure I am, as per usual, when you turned up out of nowhere and started kicking me. As if I'd ever done anything to you!"

"As if you'd—" It takes Sollux a couple of false starts to process this information. He sputters like a broken faucet before finding his words. "You blinded me and knocked my teeth out!"

"I didn't want to krill you!" You raise your hands in a defensive manner, palms up. "I just wanted to make you hate me a little, that's all!"

"A _little_?" He's disbelieving, and you can see his shoulders start to shake. You are unable to tell if he's laughing or not. "You killed one of my best friends!" Twisting the knife in harder, as if that was not clear enough, he continues: "You krilled FF for no reason, you bulgesucker!"

"I didn't want to!" you shout. "I couldn't stop myself!" Your voice cracks at the end of the sentence. "And stop using fish puns, I forbid you!"

You don't know who starts first, but with a growl, you lunge at each other and roll over, wrestling in the sand. His hands are underneath your shirt, digging into your ripped stomach. Your hands are in his hair, claws pulling at the strands and scratching at his scalp, catching on the sensitive skin around the base of his horns. 

 

** > Sollux: Aggress! **

 

You didn't know your telekinetic powers were in limited supply, but apparently there are a lot of things you weren't aware of when it came to life and death. You may have used up all the psionics you have ever had, and you may be absolutely terrible in hand-to-hand combat, but you are going to do your best to serve finface a fresh and filling knuckle sandwich. You haven't brawled like this since you stumbled out of the brooding caverns sweeps ago, when you barely managed to keep on your newly-formed legs and your skin was crackling with blue and red, the hairs on the backs of your arms singed or burnt away. But you are entering this fight with a _lot_ of enthusiasm.

Eridan fights like a grub, shoving and scratching at your chest and face. His arms fly and flap to try and keep you from aggressing, and his fangs are exposed in a grimace. You have to get the right angle at which you can grab his wrists and twist his arm away, listening for the telltale popping sound that means you've dislocated his shoulder. Hearing that sound would be immensely pleasing, but you are prepared to settle to simply cause extreme pain: you wouldn't be able to dislocate it, anyway, since your upper arm strength has always been terrible. To add to that, you've got the build and motor skills of a sack of coat hangers. 

Despite being a sea dweller who is hardly ever underwater, Eridan is still built like a swimmer. For six sweeps and a nerd who has only ever played games for girls, he has admirable upper body strength and his legs are like a vice around your waist. If he had any idea how to turn that strength and his more compact form to his advantage, you would be in a lot more trouble. He doesn't know where his strengths lie and, like you, the last time he fought like this was during the wiggler trials. In this fight, he is blinder than you are. Still, underestimating him would be a mistake. You will have to be careful.

You grab him by one of his horns, right on the wave, and pull on it as hard as you can, trying to get him away from you. He groans as you twist his head round, and you use that moment of his pain to brace yourself and shove your arms against his chest, pushing him off you.

He falls on his spinal crevice, chest heaving. His glasses are askew, eyes shining white behind them. You can't see this, but you can smell the slimy laver that is his heavy breaths. His horns smell like orange creamsicle that's melted into the sand, and his hair is a sticky, dark prune. Your second sight thins out at the ends – his quiff must have started to unravel with the sand and sea salt air, and that's why you can't smell its edges as sharply. You don't even want to know about the amount of hair wax that goes into his daily routine. He probably polishes his horns and uses a file to keep the ends neat, you think with disdain. Unfortunately for Eridan, you know your horns are not just for show. You bow your head down; square your shoulders, aim at his chest, and charge.

You are mentally bracing yourself to hit him on the stomach, or catch him on the neck, and you plan your next move ahead in the few seconds that you lunge through the air. What you don't take into account, however, is the possibility that you will miss him entirely, which is what happens. Eridan rolls out of the way and you land face-first, your pan bumping against the ground and your sniffnode taking most of the damage, burrowing deep into the sand. 

You raise your head to try and get your bearings, but he's faster: both of his hands slam onto the space between your four horns, pushing your face back into the ground. Your arms are squashed under you and he keeps pressing down. Sand is everywhere: in your eye sockets, in your mouth, up your sniffnode mingling with the beginnings of a nosebleed. He's making it impossible for you to position yourself based on your surroundings, because you can't sense them, and you realise that the fuckpod knows exactly what he's doing.

If it was someone else having their face shoved violently into the sand, you would maybe take a moment to respect Eridan's dastardly machinations, but you are currently too preoccupied with trying to get yourself out of this to appreciate the cleverness of his tactic. Your legs scramble until you are able to put your knees under yourself and lift your torso up, extracting your squashed arms. You flail blindly behind you until one of your hands swats against the side of his face, goes up, and feels on the base of a horn. You pull on it as hard as you can, and you hear him swear. 

The pressure on your head eases up and you pull harder, willing all the muscles you haven't got to make this happen, and _yes_ – even though it's for shorter than a blink and less than an inch, Eridan is lifted off the ground. You use the grip you have on his horn as leverage to lift yourself up, your shoulders hitting vertically against his chest, and you throw him off you. Unfortunately, he takes advantage of your short feeling of relief to catch you off guard and yank on your shirt collar. You tumble down right after him, landing flush on his lap. There is an unpleasant wet feeling on the back of your neck: his wound must have started bleeding again. 

Now that the sand is mostly out of your mouth and sniffnode, you can see once more. The sky above you is an overripe black grape, dark blue and sickeningly sweet. Stray grains of sand crunch between your remaining teeth. Ready to aggress again, you raise yourself up on your elbows, making sure to dig them painfully into Eridan's stomach. He groans with pain, but you're already up before he can react, hands braced in the sand on either side of him.

His eyes are a lemon juice white and the mutant streak in his hair an unripe raspberry as you aggress. The pity you felt for him has been replaced with an almost entirely different feeling, and you are going to make sure that the asshole is completely aware of that.

You aggress his mouth with yours.

 

** > Eridan: Accede. **

 

You're kissing Sollux Captor.

No, wait – Sollux Captor is kissing _you_. His forked tongue – or his two tongues, you're not really sure – wraps around yours and tightens its grip. The feeling of him sucking on your tongue is like a pair of slimy creepers is trying to pull it out of its root. You struggle not to gag, and you bite on the roof of his tongue as a warning. He doesn't stop: by now you are definitely certain that it's two tongues you're dealing with, because one of them untangles from yours and slides against the inside of your cheek, while the other slips down the length and to the tip of your tongue. 

You've never kissed anyone like this before, and you had no idea it involved so much management and what is, frankly, a startling amount of saliva. Feferi and you have only ever chastely pecked on the lips, when your moirallegiance was in its grub stage and you knew that was the thing to do to show your moirail affection or to calm her down. You'd kissed Vriska once or twice when you were her kismesis, but she'd only let you as a last resort when she wanted to put an end to your whining. 

This is entirely different. Blood has gone down Sollux's lip and into his mouth and now you can taste it on your tongue as you lick at his gums, savouring the fact that you're the reason he no longer has most of his teeth. Sand sticks to his bloodied face and it chafes against your lips. It sticks on your fangs as you bare them to bite at his mouth and nip at his cheek. This isn't about feeling good: it's about dominance. You push your hands into his hair and dig your claws into his scalp, grabbing tufts of hair between your fingers and pulling his head back. He growls as his arms lash out and hit at yours. He thwacks them back on the ground and pins you by the wrists. He leans into your face, mouth spread into a grimace which would be more threatening if he still had fangs. Feferi's goggles hang around his neck and dangle between the two of you.

"I hate you," he declaims. You look at him, blinking dumbly, and he sniffs back at you – you wonder what you smell like to him. You employ your best simpering leer, the kind that used to drive Vriska up the wall. 

A drop of blood dangles from the tip of his nose, and then it slides off, plopping down onto your chin. Your tongue snakes out to lick it. The taste is absolutely disgusting, like rubbing a rusty spoon on the roof of your mouth, but it's worth it for the almost imperceptible shudder Sollux gives on top of you. He lets go of your wrists and gingerly sits up. You know what's coming. You've read about this in some of the horrid romantic literature that Kanaya let you borrow and you've seen it in the films you used to watch with Karkat, but you never thought you would actually do it with anyone, at least not at six sweeps. Vriska kept putting it off, and really, that should have been the warning sign about your relationship falling apart. 

You grab his wrist, your claws digging into his skin. He growls at you, but doesn't pull away. You haven't been this close to a lowblood before: you know their blood flows faster than yours does, and that's one of the reasons why they have a shorter lifespan, but you had no idea how _warm_ they were. It reminds you of waking up immediately after sundown and running to the rocks on the beach. Despite the whinnies of your lusus which you always understood as warning you that you would catch your death if you didn't bundle up, you would take your shirt off and lie on the rock warmed with the sun, soaking the heat through your skin. You want to run your hands up his arms and see if the rest of him is that warm, but you don't think that would be quadrant-appropriate behaviour. 

Instead, your fingers entwine briefly, and then you lift your shirt up with your free hand. His fingers push into your wound until they are coated with your blood. You wince and squeeze your eyes shut before tears of pain get the chance to escape. His nose is still bleeding, and you swipe the blood off his lower lip with the pad of your thumb. You bring your thumb to your mouth, and he brings his fingers to his nose, giving them an experimental sniff. His nose wrinkles. He doesn't like the thought of this any more than you do. 

You look at the pair of goggles around his neck, and think back on the smell of ozone, tyrian purple blood and distant honks. "I hate you too," you say, and you lick his blood off your thumb at the same time that his tongues wrap around his fingers and lick your blood off.

It's so typical that you had to die to get a kismesis.

 

** > Sollux: Fill a quadrant. **

 

Blood is disgusting and you are never, ever doing that again. Highbloods can keep their repulsive kinks and absurd rites to themselves from now on.

 

** > Eridan: React to sudden change in dream bubble. **

 

What sudden ch—

Lightning splits the sky open. 

At first it's a thin tear across the horizon, and then it expands and engulfs the sea, the beach, Sollux and you, everything. For a couple of moments, you are entirely blinded. 

"What the—" 

"It's a new memory, dickbrain," says Sollux, and there's something that strikes you as odd about his voice. You blink repeatedly until the white spots are almost gone from your vision, and you rub at your eyes to help get rid of the rest of them. Sollux has got to his feet and is looking at something that's behind you, looking at it so intently and with such dumb confusion on his face that his mouth is hanging slightly open. The sky behind him is red, and the ground you're sitting on feels much more solid. You turn around.

You find yourself at the foot of a mountain hewn out of a dark teal stone. There is a cave opening at the top, and there are roughly made steps leading down from it. You are sat so close to the bottom of the stairs that your fingers are almost touching the lowest stair.

There is a girl sitting a couple of dozen steps above you, hugging her knees. Her eyes are closed, and she's tapping her fingers gently on her shins, humming.

You know that song.

You know that girl.

Your blood pusher sinks to your bile sac. 

 

** > Sollux: Watch. **

 

You can totally do that now. The best thing about the fact that you can do that is that you no longer have to rely on your nose or your taste. You put your hands to your face and you feel that all the blood and wounds have gone: you feel your eye sockets and nearly poke yourself in the eye. You can see again. _You can see._

You watch Eridan get up and ascend the stairs running, taking them two at a time. He stops just before her, teetering. She opens her eyes, and you can't smell lemon juice: you can _see_ that they're completely white.

"Fef—" tries Eridan, but his voice dies in his throat before he gets anything else out. His shoulders are hunched and he looks like he's been kicked in the shame globes. She shakes her head and just like that, he crumples at her feet, face in his hands as he starts to cry. Hesitantly, she reaches over and pats his head, at which point he scuttles closer to her like a frightened, wounded meowbeast. She brushes his hair away from his face, and leans down to whisper something to him that you don't catch.

And then, she raises her head, looks right down at you, and smiles.

You smile back, and start ascending the stairs.

The afterlife isn't that bad.

 

** > Level up. **


End file.
